Afterwards

by Gina Berriault

Hal Costigan is the kind of man people envy. A candidate for Congress, he has a loving wife, a supportive family, a devoted mother. He is a man on the rise -- until he is caught in an affair with a high-school girl and commits suicide, leaving a family whose futures are irrevocably changed by his act. His mother, sister, brother, and lover are haunted by his memory and cannot find consolation in each other. In Afterwards, Gina Berriault charts the corrosive power of guilt and loneliness and shows us how one terrible act can bind and possess a family forever.

Genres: Fiction, Family

143 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

Berriault was born in Long Beach, California, to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents. Her father was a freelance writer and Berriault took her inspiration from him, using his stand-up typewriter to write her first stories while still in grammar school.

Berriault had a prolific writing career, which included stories, novels and screenplays. Her writing tended to focus on life in and around San Francisco. She published four novels and three collections of short stories, including Women in Their Beds: New & Selected Stories (1996), which won the PEN/Faulkner Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award. In 1997 Berriault was chosen as winner of the Rea Award for the Short Story, for outstanding achievement in that genre.

Berriault taught writing at the Iowa Writers Workshop and San Francisco State University. She also received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Ingram-Merrill Fellowship, a Commonwealth Gold Medal for Literature, the Pushcart Prize and several O'Henry prizes.

She adapted her short story "The Stone Boy" for a film of the same title, released in 1984.[2] The same story had previously been adapted by another writer for a 1960 television presentation.[

Reviews

[Kallie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gina Berriault's voice -- that unique artistry so important to fiction -- is among the best of all novelist's and short story writers. And what is voice exactly? Hard to say, to describe; so much feeling is involved, so much of what cannot, actually, be expressed in words. That's a strange thing to say about writing, but true. Words and narrative are not enough to create art (as opposed to entertainment). In this story, she is as usual merciless about revealing human limitations of awareness, but also compassionate -- so we are brought to sympathy for characters who would usually get little respect in our real world, because the depth of Berriault's own compassion toward and insights into the human psyche are like no other writer's. In 'Afterwards,' a story about family survivors of a suicide, her wisdom reveals to readers the souls of such people, their grief and especially their confusion. Writers seldom venture into that conscious and unconscious labyrinth of dumb emotion and blurted observations but Berriault is fearless.

[Kinsey · Rating 1 out of 5]

No bueno. No plot, no inspiring thoughts, I don't even have any quotes from this one.

[Kallie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gina Berriault's voice -- that unique artistry so important to fiction -- is among the best of all novelist's and short story writers. And what is voice exactly? Hard to say, to describe; so much feeling is involved, so much of what cannot, actually, be expressed in words. That's a strange thing to say about writing, but true. Words and narrative are not enough to create art (as opposed to entertainment). In this story, she is as usual merciless about revealing human limitations of awareness, but also compassionate -- so we are brought to sympathy for characters who would usually get little respect in our real world, because the depth of Berriault's own compassion toward and insights into the human psyche are like no other writer's. In 'Afterwards,' a story about family survivors of a suicide, her wisdom reveals to readers the souls of such people, their grief and especially their confusion. Writers seldom venture into that conscious and unconscious labyrinth of dumb emotion and blurted observations but Berriault is fearless.